Dr Matilde Nardelli
I joined the London School of Film, Media and Design in 2015. Prior to joining UWL, I held teaching positions at University College London, the Slade School of Fine Art and the University of Greenwich. Between 2007 and 2012, I was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow within the Film Programme of the Centre for Intercultural Studies at UCL.
My research is concerned with media aesthetics, theories and cultures, and with the moving image in particular. I am interested in cinema’s relation to other mass media – television, photography, computers – as well as its relation to the category ‘art’ and traditionally fine-art disciplines such as painting or sculpture.
My monograph Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Re-Making the Image in the 1960s was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020 (paperback 2022). I am co-editor of the volume Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017) and have contributed essays to several collections, including, more recently, Theorizing Film through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). I have written articles on media obsolescence, waste and cinema, the ‘move’ of cinema to museums and galleries, the desert and apocalyptic imaginaries, which have appeared in peer-reviewed publications including: NECSUS: European Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Journal of Visual Culture, Tate Papers, Photographies, The Soundtrack, The Oxford Art Journal.
I have collaborated in projects and events at various cultural institutions, including the British Film Institute, Tate Britain, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Estorick Collection of Italian Modern Art, the Museo del 900 in Milan and the Max Planck Institute in Rome.
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Qualifications
BA (UCL, University of London), MA (UCL, University of London), PhD (UCL, University of London)
Teaching
At the London School of Film, Media and Design, I have taught across three programmes: Media and Communications, Photography, and Film Production.
I convene the undergraduate modules:
- Visual Media Cultures: Production and Consumption
- Photography Theory
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Research and publications
Books
Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2020; paperback 2022)
Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art, (eds) Pierpaolo Antonello, Matilde Nardelli and Margherita Zanoletti (Peter Lang, 2017)
Articles and book chapters
‘A Cinema of Research: Bruno Munari and Monte Olimpino’, in Rossella Catanese and Jennifer Malvezzi, eds, New Paths in Italian Experimental Cinema (London: Palgrave/MacMillan, forthcoming).
‘Like a Mass Image: Fellini’s The Temptations of Dr Antonio, Advertising and Mimicry’, Italian Studies, 77/4: Cultural Studies (2022), pp. 416-434.
‘Cinema as (In)visible Object: Looking, Making and Re-Making’, chapter in Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli (eds), Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
‘Light and Liminal: Marinella Pirelli’s Expanded Cinema’, in Anthony Cristiano and Carlo Coen (eds), Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
‘Oasis/Desert: Interruption and Continuation’, Prospect VI: Oasis (2018).
‘The Small, The Large and the Moving: Bruno Munari and Cinema’, in Pierpaolo Antonello, Matilde Nardelli, and Margherita Zanoletti (eds.), Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017).
‘Bruno Munari’s Lightness’ (co-authored introduction), in Pierpaolo Antonello, Matilde Nardelli, and Margherita Zanoletti (eds.), Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017).
‘Munari cinematico’, in Marco Sammicheli and Giovanni Rubino (eds.), Munari Politecnico. Fare dell’arte con qualunque mezzo (Varese: Nomos, 2015).
‘No End to the End: The Desert as Eschatology in Late Modernity’, Tate Papers, issue 22 (Autumn 2014).
‘“The Sprawl of Entropy”: Cinema, Waste and Obsolescence in the 1960s and 1970s’, NECSUS: The European Journal of Media Studies, issue 4: Waste, guest edited by Alexandra Schneider and Wanda Strauven and (Autumn 2013).
‘End(ur)ing Photography’, Photographies vol. 5/2 (August 2012).
‘Leafing Through Cinema’, chapter in Steven Allen and Laura Hubner (eds.), Framing Film (Bristol: Intellect, 2012).
‘Blow-Up and the Plurality of Photography’, chapter in Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (eds.), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 2011).
‘Some Reflections on Antonioni, Sound and the Silence of La notte’, The Soundtrack, 3/1 (July 2010), 11-24.
‘Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 8/3 (December 2009), 243-64.
‘Between Stillness and Movement: Boredom, Photography and Time in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse’, Object 7 (2004/2005), pp. 82-95.
Reviews, interviews and featured articles
Review of Timothy Barker, Against Transmission: Media Philosophy and the Engineering of Time (Bloomsbury, 2018), in film-philosophy 24/1 (February 2020), pp. 75-77.
Review of Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Visual Studies (April 2015).
‘Boundary Crossing’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 36/2 (2013), pp. 303-306.
Review of Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
(Wallflower, 2009), Film-Philosophy 14/2 (2010), 191-195. ‘Dream Houses’, Sophia 3 (June 2009), pp. 15-16.
Interview with artist filmmaker Tony Hill, May 2009.
‘Cinema Out of Bounds’, review of ‘Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception’, Conference held at Tate Modern, 17-19 April 2009. Please visit the LUX website.
Review of Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia), by Rachel Moore (Afterall, 2006), The Art Book, vol. 14, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 69-70.
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Conferences
'Munari Cinematico', International Study Day on Munari, Museo del Novecento, Milan, 3 June 2014 (by invitation) – on the occasion of the exhibition Munari Politecnico (April-September 2014).
'Between Screen and Canvas: Pasolini, the Cinematic and the Pictorial', Pasolini Study Day, BFI, London, 20 April 2013.
'Revisiting the Relation between Art and Cinema: Thinking Intermedially with Pier Paolo Pasolini', lecture, Sotheby Institute of Art, 8 April 2013.
Cinema as Object, study day and exhibition, co-organised with Jayne Parker, Slade Research Centre, UCL, 21st March 2013 – with support from Slade School of Fine Art and History of Art Department, UCL, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/slade-research-centre/archived-research/project-18.
'Travelling Light: Bruno Munari’s Cinematics', talk at Estorick Collection, London, 27 October 2012 (on the occasion of the exhibition Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past, 19 September to 23 December 2012).
'Deserts, Ends and Beginnings', Collapse, conference, UCL, 11 May 2012.
'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography', Antonioni 1912/2012, Conference at Casa Italiana, New York University, New York, 30 March 2012.
'Antonioni and the Plurality of Photography', Antonioni Centenary Workshop, University College Cork, Cork, 24 January 2012.
'The Desert and the End, c. 1962-1975', Landscape and Eschatology, symposium, Tate Britain, London, 13 January 2012.
'Nested Architectures: Cinemas in the Gallery', at Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century, conference, Cambridge, UK, 6-8 July 2011.
'Two or Three Ways of Expanding Cinema', Arte Povera and Beyond: Milan, Turin, Rome, symposium, Italian Cultural Institute/Camden Arts Centre, London, 12-13 March 2011.
'The Cinematization of Photography: Film and the Photonovel', Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, conference, University of Winchester, UK, 6-9 September 2009.
'Light Sculptures: Marinella Pirelli’s Expanded Cinema', Expanded Cinema Seminar: Expanded Cartography and New Live Cinema, symposium, Central St Martins, London, UK, 20 May 2009.
'Space of Time: Antonioni, the Desert and the End', Antonioni Symposium, University of Sussex, UK, 23 February 2008.
'Matter … Dissolves Into Motion: Cinema and Monumentality', research seminar, Slade School of Art, London, UK, 11 December 2007.
'Deleuze and Cinema', Guest lecture and seminar, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, October 2007.
'Materiality and Monumentality in Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett', Real Things: Matter, Materiality, Representation 1880-Present, conference, University of York, UK, 5-8 July 2007.
'Into the Loop: Rodney Graham and Cinematicity,' Cinematicity 1895: Before and After, conference, University of Essex, UK, 24-25 March 2007.
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Research degree supervision
Florian Stephens, ‘Unsuitable Objects: Provoking Reality Capture through Artistic Research Practice’ (UWL, first supervisor)
Alice Giuliani, ‘Picturing the Unfathomable: The Ecological Aesthetics of Digital Images' (UWL, co-supervisor)
Alec Howlett, ‘Conspiracy and Cartography: The Mapping Impulse of Conspiracy Theory’ (UWL, second supervisor)
